C-VeT the UCLA campus vehicular testbed: Integration of VANET and Mesh networks

Vehicular communications are becoming a reality under the push of increased transportation safety requirements and huge investments of several actors in the field like car manufacturers and Public Transport Authorities. As a consequence, the building blocks of the ”Vehicle Grid” (radios, Access Points, spectrum, standards, etc.) will soon be in place enabling a broad gamut of applications ranging from automatic safety systems, intelligent transport, entertainment, urban sensing and environmental protection/monitoring. In this paper, we take a visionary look at ”Vehicular Grid” and we argue that the cooperation of pure ad-hoc vehicle-to-vehicle communications and roadside infrastructure is fundamental to broaden the supported applications. The paper further describes the activities carried out at UCLA to deploy an open testbed integrating ad hoc vehicle-to-vehicle communications and a wireless mesh backhaul based on MobiMESH hardware/software solutions.